Alex Tanguay (40) scores on New York Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist (30), during the shootout period of an NHL hockey game Thursday Nov. 13, 2014. (Frank Franklin II, The Associated Press)

A new “Hockey Talk” podcast here, with a first-time guest. His name is Allan Muir, the lead hockey writer at SI.com, and a tremendous one at that. He’s a former colleague of mine at SI, and this is the first of what should be many podcasts with him. But the future ones will be on a new podcast, by the name of “Inside Hockey, with Dater and Muir.” It’ll have its own new logo and new place on iTunes, so look for that real soon. Call this a warm-up podcast for that one, on “Hockey Talk.”

Allan is a renaissance man. He plays in a rock band, he’s the father of two hockey-playing young boys, he’s a former hockey-card writer at Beckett, where he literally wrote the stuff on the backs of cards about players. When I was a kid buying at least 20 packs a week, most of the cards said the player “Owns a sporting goods store” or “Sells insurance in the off-season.” How quaint, eh? Players don’t have off-season jobs anymore.

The Winnipeg Jets’ Andrew Ladd (16) scores on Avalanche goaltender Reto Berra during the first period March 19, 2014, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. (John Woods, Canadian Press)

You asked for more player interviews on my “Hockey Talk” podcast, and so that is my command to fulfill. Voila, 10 minutes here with Reto Berra, the Avs’ backup goalie who is hoping to quiet the critics this season following his fairly rough (well, trying to be diplomatic here) first couple games with the Avs last year following his acquisition from Calgary for a second-round pick.

Anaheim Ducks defenseman Clayton Stoner, bottom, and Colorado Avalanche center Tomas Vincour, top, fight for the puck in the first period of an NHL preseason hockey game Monday, Sept. 22, 2014 in Denver. (Chris Schneider, The Associated Press)

Some people who follow me and Stephen Burtch on Twitter were hoping for a knock-down, drag-out fight about “fancystats” in the NHL today. In one corner would be me, the print dinosaur, who said “Analytics, Schmamalytics, Get off my Lawn!” and in the other corner would be the young progressive shaking his head at the poor old fool.

Except, that didn’t happen and never was going to happen. Stephen is a smart, engaging young man and I like to think I’m still a somewhat smart, engaging older man, and when the Twain met on this podcast, we had an amicable hour together.

Patrick Roy, left, the new head coach/vice president of hockey operations for the Colorado Avalanche, smiles as he stands for a photo opportunity with Joe Sakic, the team’s executive vice president of hockey operations, following an NHL hockey news conference Tuesday May 28, 2013, in Denver. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

Here is the entire audio of Thursday’s press conference with Patrick Roy and Joe Sakic. Some interesting stuff in there that couldn’t be all squeezed into the paper’s stories.

One highlight: Roy said he will have a top two lines of this going into the season:
O’Reilly-Duchene-Iginla
Landeskog-MacKinnon-Tanguay

MacKinnon moves to center full time finally. The smart and most logical move for Roy.

Click on the player below to hear the whole 24-minute presser, or on the iTunes link to download. Subscribe to the “Hockey Talk” podcast so everything will come automatically to your device in the future.

I’ll try to do more of these player interviews and just post them here for easy listening pleasure. Keep in mind, I’m in preseason mode too, so pardon me for some of the stuttering questions and a minor factual error or two in a couple of them. While I’ll never be confused for a professional broadcaster, one of my pledges this year is to ask better questions, especially when I’m on the microphone for all to hear. Usually, I’m better one-on-one with players with nobody recording it for mass listening, but I’ll be better at this art going forward.

Mitchell Heard is in his second training camp with the Avs. The number should be three, but the lockout of 2012 took care of that. He has 86 games of pro experience with Lake Erie, but only five goals. But he has drawn good notices otherwise for his toughness and defensive ability. He’s a good agitator by all accounts. He has that great cocky/arrogant look to him, which is not to say he is that way in real life. He’s been nothing but a gentleman with me anyway. But in hockey parlance, that’s a good compliment. He gets under opponents’ skin. He could be the carbon copy of Dan Hinote with the Avs some day soon, or better.

Ryan O’Reilly skates before the Avalanche’s game against the Edmonton Oilers on Dec. 19. (Karl Gehring, The Denver Post)

Before I take off for some needed R’n’R, one last “Hockey Talk” here. Ryan Boulding of Mile High Sports is my guest, and Ryan O’Reilly is the main topic, a discussion of his two-year, $12 million deal signed Wednesday. Is this the start of a beautiful new relationship again, or is it just a two-year bridge to when he’ll either bolt unrestricted or get traded first?

Was there a winner in this latest negotiation? A loser? We break it all down.

On the latest edition of “Hockey Talk with Adrian Dater,” I hash all this out with guests Ryan Boulding of Mile High Sports and Avs superfan Dario Ronzone. It’s a pretty spirited discussion about that and the other moves by the team. I reveal what I believe the Avs’ offer to keep Stastny was. Sorry, gotta click on the podcast to find out.

Joe Sakic was named Executive Vice President of Hockey Operations for the Colorado Avalanche, May 10, 2013. The announcement came at a press conference at the Pepsi Center in Denver. (Photo By RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)

Here’s another audio file of a conference call here for the “Hockey Talk” the podcast. It’s of Joe Sakic’s 15-minute talk with the media today about the Avs’ free-agent moves. We’ve edited it slightly to take out pauses and to get to the good stuff.

A couple items from it: He will keep trying to work out a new deal with Ryan O’Reilly before arbitration, and he tried to get other defensemen on Tuesday, mentioning Brooks Orpik and Anton Stralman in particular.

Jarome Iginla #12 of the Boston Bruins celebrates his second period goal against the New Jersey Devils at the Prudential Center on March 18, 2014 in Newark, New Jersey. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty

Here is the audio of the conference call me and a few other reporters were on with Jarome Iginla on Tuesday.

Iginla says, “Not to be arrogant, but I think I can still be very good” with the Avs, despite having turned 37 on Tuesday. The fact is, of all the available free agents in this year’s class, Iginla was the player who scored the most goals last season (31). So, it seems like it’s a little premature to write him off, I’d say.

Click on the player below to hear him answer questions, or wait for the iTunes link shortly.

Conner Bleackley is selected twenty-third by the Colorado Avalanche in the first round of the 2014 NHL Draft at the Wells Fargo Center on June 27, 2014 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

For your listening enjoyment, I have set this up so that one and all can listen to my interview, along with Rick Sadowski from NHL.com, with Avs chief scout Rick Pracey after Saturday’s NHL draft.

Pracey details all the picks and why he felt they were worthy choices in this nearly 15 minute audio file.

This was one of my favorite podcasts in a while. Forty-four minutes with Jeff Marek, the uber-talented Rogers Sportsnet television personality, also the co-host of the excellent Marek vs. Wyshynski podcast. Jeff is, for my money, one of the most knowledgeable hockey people in the world, whose opinion I truly value. He’s a student of the game and, more important to me, a student of the history of the game.

He’s a young guy, but he has a superior appreciation for the history of the game and is full of good stories. In this podcast, Marek talks about how he buried former Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard – literally. That, and lots of talk about the Ryan O’Reilly saga with the Avs, and what he thinks will happen with Paul Stastny.

Avalanche center Ryan O’Reilly brings the puck up the ice in the third period of an NHL game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday, January 21, 2014 at the Pepsi Center. (Karl Gehring, The Denver Post)

Tyson Barrie of the Colorado Avalanche brings the puck up the ice as Mikael Granlund of the Minnesota Wild pursues during the first quarter of a playoff game on April 17, 2014. (John Leyba, The Denver Post)

Sorry it’s been a little while since my last Hockey Talk podcast, especially since the Avs’ season ended about three weeks ago. As I said earlier on this blog, once the hockey season ends, I am thrown into the brig of general assignment stories. That means I’m just as apt to be writing a story about the Rapids goalie as I am of the Avs.

But here is 55 solid minutes of Avalanche talk here, with two of my homies — Darrell Rubin and Ryan Boulding. We talk about the Avs’ exit from the playoff, and why that happened, in detail.

This is the day after Matt Cooke made headlines with his kneeing infraction on Tyson Barrie, so a discussion of the indcident takes up a good portion of the first part of the podcast. But we venture into many other topics, including the matchups the rest of the series and the sports writing business other behind the scenes stories. We were also joined by Dawn Mitchell, a sports reporter-anchor with Fox 9 TV in Minneapolis. She’s also a New England native, who went to Boston College (where my sister Stephanie went) and who wore a Red Sox cap, so she scored points already with me over that.

My guilty conscience came out a bit on this podcast. I started feeling remorse about criticizing the Wild organization for its handling of the Cooke affair last night. So I’ll say it here too: sorry. I took it a little too personally that Cooke wasn’t available to talk to last night and lashed out a bit at the Wild over it. I should have just shut up. I mean, I have issues with some stuff and don’t want to just grant total immunity over some stuff, but I shouldn’t have made such a big deal out of it, so sorry to the Wild PR staff.

I’ve been waiting for a while to have this guy on the podcast, and Monday night it happened. Michael Russo of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the paper’s Minnesota Wild beat writer and NHL columnist, joins me for 67 minutes of Avalanche-Wild first-round playoff breakdown and much, much more.

Mike has lots of good stories for a guy who started covering hockey the same season I did, 1995-96, covering the Florida Panthers for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. He grew up 10 minutes from the the Nassau Coliseum, going to Islanders games starting at age 5 or 6, started working as a paid sports writer when he was 16 or 17 and has been doing it ever since.

We talk a lot about the Avs and Wild upcoming series, specifically: Can Ilya Bryzgalov find new life as a Wild playoff goalie? Have Ryan Suter and Zach Parise been everything they were cracked up to be? What will be the X-factor for each team in a possible win? That, and sooo much more.

Matt Duchene and Ryan O’Reilly slap at the puck in front of Chicago goaltender Antti Raanta in the first period of a game between the Colorado Avalanche and Blackhawks on March 12, 2014, in Denver. (Karl Gehring, The Denver Post)

Around 1999 or so, I came across a new writer at the Fort-Worth Star Telegram named Tracey Myers. She was pretty quiet, pretty reserved, just making her way into the world of covering an NHL hockey team, the Dallas Stars. Smash cut to 15 years later, and Ms. Myers is the queen of Chicago, the voice on all things Blackhawks, having covered them since 2011 for Comcast Sportsnet of Chicago, where she has a hybrid job of doing some TV work and also writing for the company website on the team.

The 54-minute podcast focuses almost exclusively on the Colorado Avalanche, where the team stands right now, looking ahead to the playoffs and a likely matchup with Chicago, some discussion about the trade deadline and more.

You can listen above, or found here on iTunes. If you go there, give it a rating won’t you? Help a brother out.

When I bumped into Dave Reid at the Bell Centre today, he originally had other lunch plans. When those fell through, it was my lucky day, because then I got to take the ex-Avs player out to lunch and record our conversation for this latest episode of “Hockey Talk.”

Reid is a tremendous hockey analyst with TSN. He’s just so smart about the game of hockey and can break down a game as well as anybody I’ve ever met. Seriously.

In this episode (you can listen down below, under the video), we talk about some of the good old days with the Avs, memories of that playoff run in 2001 that brought the Cup to Denver. What was it like in the dressing room before Game 7? What was it like on that plane to New Jersey, down 3-2 in the Cup Finals to the Devils?

Colorado center Nathan MacKinnon tried to take the puck from St. Louis defenseman Ian Cole (28) in the third period. The St. Louis Blues defeated the Colorado Avalanche 2-1 at the Pepsi Center Saturday afternoon, March 8, 2014. (Karl Gehring, The Denver Post)

A new podcast here, with Ryan Boulding of Mile High Sports and Bleacher Report, and two random but fun guests: Paul and his father, Bill, from Newfoundland.

We break down the Avs’ game with the Blues on Saturday and also that of the trade deadline. 39 minutes of concise Avalanche talk, with a passionate newcomer from Canada who truly loves the Avs. Click on the player below, and my podcasts are now back up on iTunes, so click there for them if that’s easier.

New “Hockey Talk” podcast here. One hour and 19 minutes of gabbing between me and a couple of my regulars, Ryan Boulding from Mile High Sports Magazine and Bleacher Report, and Darrel Rubin, all-around gadfly, man about town.

Topics of discussion center mostly on the Avalanche – what they should do at the trade deadline, what’s the latest gossip, how the final 24 games are forecast to go, whether the Olympic break will be good for the team, etc, etc., etc.

Also some talk about the social media world today, mostly where I do a little grumbling about it. Also some talk about Milan Hejduk and where he ranks in the Avs’ pantheon, and a somber look back at the lives and careers of former Avs Ruslan Salei and Karlis Skrastins.

Hope you enjoy it. Click on the player below. These are also on iTunes.

Terry Frei graduated from Wheat Ridge High School in the Denver area and has degrees in history and journalism from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He worked for the Rocky Mountain News while attending CU and joined the Post staff after graduation. He has also worked at the Oregonian in Portland, Ore., and The Sporting News. His seventh book, March 1939: Before the Madness, was issued in February 2014.

Chambers covers college and professional hockey for The Denver Post. He has written for the Post since 1994, after dumping his first 9-to-5 office job a couple years out of college. He primarily follows the University of Denver hockey team and helps cover the Avalanche.